Word.ws English Dictionary

pulls rank

pulls rank is the third-person singular simple present indicative of pull rank.

Meaning of pull rank

Verb

pull rank (third-person singular simple present pulls rank, present participle pulling rank, simple past and past participle pulled rank)

  1. To assert one's authority over a subordinate who disagrees.
    • Graduate schools teach students to use footnotes as authorities — barriers to anyone's questioning the author's conclusions. Professionalism then becomes a matter of pulling rank: the person who has the most footnotes has the last say.1980 February 9, Charley Shively, “Radical History: Not Radical Enough”, in Gay Community News, volume 7, number 28, page 12

Questions about pulls rank

What is pulls rank the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Pulls rank is the third-person singular simple present indicative of pull rank.

Words near pulls rank in the dictionary

  1. pulls out of the bag
  2. pulls out of the fire
  3. pulls out of the hat
  4. pulls over
  5. pulls punches
  6. pulls rank
  7. pulls round
  8. pulls short
  9. pulls short up
  10. pulls someone down a peg
  11. pulls someone over the coals

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pulls rank (page history and authors); pull rank (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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